The subject matter of this disclosure is generally related to data storage systems that maintain large data sets for supporting multiple host applications and concurrent users. A data storage system may include one or more storage arrays. Each storage array may include a plurality of computing nodes that manage access to tangible data storage devices. More particularly, the computing nodes present one or more logical production volumes of storage that are backed by the tangible storage devices. A separate logical production volume may be created for each host application. The host applications access the data associated with the production volumes by sending IOs to the storage array.
It is sometimes desirable to move inactive data out of a storage array in order to make storage resources available for other data. For example it is known to archive infrequently accessed data on low cost, low performance media such as magnetic tape. However moving data to magnetic tape is a manual process so both the data archival and data retrieval processes are slow. A more recently developed technique is to configure the storage array to move infrequently accessed data to inexpensive remote cloud storage. Unlike with magnetic tapes, the storage array can automatically archive inactive data and retrieve archived data from cloud storage in response to IOs. However, storage array resources are still required to maintain the logical volume.